Blog 2.4 Adds New Social Sharing Options and Brings Enhancements to Blog Management

Using a blog powered by Magento is beneficial in any case and especially great if you have a chance to add relevant posts to product pages.

All these and above are the functionality provided by the previous version of our Blog extension for Magento 2. Today, we announce a new version of the extension that has a lot of new valuable functions on board.

Blog 2.4 Features

Social Media Sharing Options

Sharing official blog posts in social media is quite popular among customers and visitors and may be considered as a public approval of your content strategy. Still, if the shared content is indistinct and unattractive, visitors may neglect the provided option.

So, in order to avoid such a negative influence, the latest version of the extension supports the Open Graph and Twitter Cards markups.

Open Graph Support

The Open Graph markup includes the following tags:

“og:site_name” content=”Store title” – store title;

“og:type” content=”article” – the type of marked-up object. ‘Content’ in this particular case;

og:locale – the locale to be used;

og:image – an image representing blog post;

og:title – blog post title;

og:description – blog post short description;

og:url – canonical blog post URL.

Twitter Cards Support

Twitter successfully recognizes and uses the Open Graph markup and the above tags as well. Still, we added two more twitter card options to your social sharing opportunities – ‘Twitter site account’ and ‘Twitter post author account’.

The options are available on the blog post editing page and in the general configuration section.

So, you can either provide them for all the posts using the ‘Default Twitter site account’ and ‘Default Twitter post author account’ general setting options or specify them for a particular article with the ‘Twitter site account’ and ‘Twitter post author account’ options available on the blog post editing page.

UI Improvements

Post Images

From now on, Magento admins are able to add title images to posts displayed on the frontend and improve the extension’s backend with the above images used in the Posts grid.

You can either take images from the uploaded media or add them from your device. You can also provide them with titles and alt texts.

The Image Upload Functionality

Above the featured image block we’ve also provided you with the hints for using different sizes of images for particular social media and maximally allowed sizes of images in pixels and bytes accepted by the extension.

Maximum Number of Categories to Display – determines the number of visible categories by default. All other categories are hidden beneath the ‘Show X More’ link.

URL Enhancements

URL Configuration

For SEO purposes, you have an opportunity to alter the structure of your URLs. You can use URL’s with or without categories. The option is located in the SEO section of the general Configuration page.

You can choose between the following URL structures:

com/blog/article;

com/blog/category/article.

If the latter one is selected, you can also specify a canonical URL on the blog post editing page.

Canonical tag

The canonical tag is required in case the post is assigned to several categories. This way, you need to determine a canonical URL to avoid duplicate content. The Canonical URL option allows you to choose among the categories the post is assigned to.

As soon as the canonical URL is provided, the extension will add the canonical URL tag to the corresponding blog post page.

Other Features

Blog Post Viewing Permissions

If you want to restrict access of particular customer groups to some posts, you can use the ‘Enable post for customer groups’ option. The provided field contains all the existing Magento customer groups, where the ‘All groups’ option is selected by default.

Bluefoot

The last new feature of this update is provided for the Magento Commerce users. The Bluefoot Magento page builder is now available for them within our blog post WYSIWYG editor.

Conclusion

The above feature scope proves extensive work performed for this latest release to improve the blog management process in a Magento 2 based store.

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